COVID-19 Response
Recovery & Preparedness
The United Nations Secretary General has developed the “UN Framework for the Immediate Socio-Economic Response to COVID-19” in order to support and complete the humanitarian and health response to the pandemic without losing sight of the promise of the 2030 Agenda. This framework includes five pillars of integrated interventions to support countries and societies in coping with the pandemic, with a special focus on countries, groups, and people at risk of being left behind.
- Health First : Ensure that essential health services are always available and more resilient
- Protecting People : Help populations to face the ordeal, thanks to social protection and basic services
- Economic Response and Recovery : Protect jobs, support small and medium enterprises and workers in the informal sector through economic stimulus programs
- Macroeconomic Response and Multilateral Collaboration : Guide the necessary ramp-up of fiscal and financial stimulus measures so that macroeconomic policies benefit the most vulnerable and strengthen multilateral and regional responses
- Social Cohesion and Community Resilience : Promote social cohesion and invest in resilience and community response systems.
These five pillars must be connected by strong environmental sustainability, gender equality and human rights to better rebuild after COVID-19. We have dedicated LABS 30-50 to each pillar of the framework in order to facilitate international collaboration and to empower and connect community-based organizations and networks into community-led response systems. A Multidisciplinary “Virtual Campus” is dedicated to Capacity Development in the four dimensions of the STIS co-creation model described above as well as the co-construction and implementation of STI-4-SDGs Roadmaps.
Global open innovation as well as multilateral and regional collaborations will be critical not only for recovering better but for “Building Back Better” towards 2030 and 2050.
Capacity Development
& Roadmaps 2030
Achieving the SDGs by 2030 and climate targets by 2050 will require profound structural changes in all sectors of society. This raises the crucial question of how to organize the strategies to achieve the goals and targets. The SDGs and the goals of the Paris Agreement are interdependent, with a complex coupling between human, technical and natural systems. Many policy interventions (such as public investments and regulations) are needed to achieve each SDG, and each intervention typically contributes to the achievement of several other goals. However, the available research studies do not give clear indication on how the implementation of the SDGs should be organized. Governments and all stakeholders need strategies to design and implement key interventions.
Building on The World in 2050 report and previous work, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and other prominent experts (Sachs et al., 2019) presented a systems policy approach to help achieve each SDG. They proposed six transformations to organize SDG interventions through a semi-modular agenda that can be designed by distinct stakeholders, but interacting with each other. Each Transformation engages a different subset of businesses and civil society, facilitating targeted problem solving, clear communication and better stakeholder engagement. The six transformations are:
1. Education, Gender and Inequality
2. Health, Well-being and Demography
3. Decarbonization of Energy and Sustainable Industry
4. Sustainable Food, Land, Water and Oceans
5. Sustainable Cities and Communities
6. Digital Revolution for Sustainable Development.
We consider the pillars of the “UN Framework for the Immediate Socio-Economic Response to COVID-19” as the ideal bedrock stakeholders should use as foundations to achieve the “six transformations” of sustainable development and ultimately evolve towards the 17 SDGs during this “Decade of Action”.
Consequently, the operational system we have put in place, is designed to accelerate the response to COVID-19 and gradually put us back on track towards the achievement of the six transformations. Bearing in mind that intervention on any SDG generally contributes to the achievement of several other goals, in a simplistic way, the first pillar “Health First” would support the achievement of the transformation “Health, Well-being and Demography “; the “Protecting People” pillar would support the achievement of the “Sustainable Food, Land, Water and Oceans” transformation; the “Economic Response and Recovery” pillar that of the transformation “Energy Decarbonization and Sustainable Industry”; the “Social Cohesion and Community Resilience” pillar that of the “Sustainable Cities and Communities” transformation; the “Macroeconomic Response and Multilateral Collaboration” pillar directly that of SDG 17. The two transformations “Education, Gender and Inequality” and “Rrevolution for Sustainable Development” both are transversal (see Model below).
